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At CES 2019 AMD just announced the first consumer 7nm graphics card- Radeon VII. It’s slated to ship February 7th for $699.

The card’s MSRP is identical to NVIDIA’s RTX 2080, which AMD is hoping to compete with. The company showed benchmarks for games like Battlefield V and Far Cry 5 where the Radeon VII comes out ahead of its NVIDIA competitor.

The GPU is manufactured with TSMC’s new 7nm process- a first in the consumer space. In terms of specs, it features 3840 stream processors running at up to 1.8 GHz and 16GB of HBM2 VRAM with a staggering 1 TB/s memory bandwidth- more than double the RTX 2080‘s.

AMD claims this equates to around 25% improved gaming performance compared to their RX Vega 64 yet the same power consumption. For DirectX 12 and Vulkan titles, this estimate rises to 40%.

Strangely, AMD didn’t state whether or not the card includes a VirtualLink port. VirtualLink is the new USB-C single cable standard for future PC VR headsets and GPUs. It’s intended to simplify the setup process of PC VR and allow laptops to easily support VR.

AMD is listed as a founding member of the standard, so we’re hoping the Radeon VII features the port. We’ve reached out to a representative of the company and will report their response.

Boys learn best from a drone, while girls benefited most from a female researcher. Guido Makransky, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, has been actively studying the benefits of VR technology in the education sector since 2014, conducting numerous studies that tested hundreds of highschool and university students’ cognitive and emotional learning processes. During

Better tidy up, you have visitors on the way. Oculus today introduced its Public Homes beta on the Rift platform, allowing users the opportunity to open up their private virtual spaces to hordes of internet strangers. Not only that, but they’ll also be able to livestream the ensuing chaos directly to Facebook Live. OCULUS PUBLIC

HTC held a special press event on Monday, just one day before CES officially started. The company announced two new VR headsets, a new VR platform, and a new VR app subscription service.

On Monday we livestreamed the presentation. Here are the highlights from that stream, including the major product announcements.

Vive Pro Eye

Vive Pro Eye is a refresh of last year’s Vive Pro– adding eye tracking technology. This allows for better social VR and gazed based UIs, but more importantly it enables foveated rendering.

Foveated rendering is a process which renders most of the view of a VR headset at lower resolution except for the exact area where the user’s eye is pointed, which is detected with eye tracking. That area in front of the eye — where humans perceive the greatest detail — is rendered at a significantly higher resolution. Foveated rendering is considered crucial for future advancement of VR as it allows for higher resolutions without impossible GPU requirements.

HTC didn’t reveal the price, but told us it will be launching in Q2 of this year.

Viveport Infinity

Viveport Infinity is a new subscription service. It gives users access to over 500 VR apps. The current Viveport subscriptions give access to just 5 apps per month, so this is a significant increase.

HTC seem to want Viveport to be the Netflix of VR. If the platform can secure enough content, Infinity could deliver on that goal.

Vive Reality System

Vive Reality System is a new VR platform for all HTC headsets. In the past, HTC was reliant on Valve’s SteamVR platform. VRS is a clear step by HTC to forge a future without that dependency.

VRS will have a VR UI for launching apps and managing settings. But like Oculus Home and SteamVR, it will also feature interactive multiplayer home spaces. We’re eager to see how HTC will compete in this already crowded space.

Vive Cosmos

Vive Cosmos is a future PC VR headset from HTC. Unlike the original Vive it uses inside-out tracking, not SteamVR “Lighthouse”. In fact, the headset’s native platform isn’t SteamVR either- it’s the new Vive Reality System.

Interestingly, HTC also suggested the headset could work with other devices, showing an image of a smartphone. The company will reveal more details “later this year”, but we expect this means it could be powered by a HTC smartphone.

The company announced today that HTC Vive and HP are sponsoring this year’s contests, which run monthly. A $50,000 annual pool will be split into cash prizes for those that top leaderboards in VR arcades across the world. Games are played on Virtuix’ Omni VR treadmill, which straps you in place with a harness and allows you to run on the spot using special shoes. Virtuix originally wanted to get Omni in people’s homes but repositioned it as a location-based product in 2017.

Each contest will consist of two teams battling it out over four days. Across January to March featured games include VRZ: Torment and Virtuix’s own Omni Arena shooter. The top 10 teams will win prizes every month, including Vive headsets for the winners. There will also be weekly contests within Omni Arena for teams of four players. At the end of the year Virtuix will gather top-scoring teams to compete in its own Omni World Championship. The intitial schedule looks like this:

· January 24-27: Omni Arena – “Coliseum” level

· February 21-24: VRZ: Torment

· March 21-24: Omni Arena – “Metropolis” level

You can sign up to take part over on the company’s website. Virtuix isn’t revealing the games for later months in the year just yet but you can bet Omni Arena will feature a few more times.

Back in November, Virtuix announced a partnership with Funovation to build its own location-based VR attractions. These Virtuix Arenas look like futuristic arcade booths that house the company’s treadmills. You can see it in action in the video above.

Want to make an idiot out of yourself in VR and then humiliate yourself even further online? There’s an app for that.

Blueprint Reality today introduced MixCast Moments, an automated process for capturing your time in VR. MixCast 2.0 already lets you make your own mixed reality videos in your home and at arcades but with MixCast Moments there’s no video editing required.

Initially designed for use in VR arcades, MixCast Moments uses Intel RealSense cameras fitted to booths to bring your actual body into footage of VR games. You can see an example of a video shot using the system below. It features the vertigo-inducing Richie’s Plank Experience. Obviously, it’s a promotional video but it looks pretty promising.

The company says that this process won’t need any editing on the user’s part. MixCast transitions between the player view and a view of the player themselves. It’s a little like getting a picture of yourself after you’ve been on a rollercoaster.

Once you have your clip you can share it to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Mixed reality capture (not be confused with Microsoft’s ‘mixed reality’ headsets) has become a popular way of conveying the power of a VR experience without asking people to put on a headset.

If you’re at CES then you can try MixCast for yourself at Intel’s booth. Otherwise it’ll be rolling out to arcades a little later on in the year. We’ve asked Blueprint if it has any plans for a rollout to home-based headsets too. The company said this feature would be coming in 2019.

TPCast Air was announced at CES 2019 in Las Vegas today. Whereas the Chinese company’s original products made the HTC Vive and other PC VR headsets wireless via streaming, this new device will beam high-end VR content into less powerful standalone headsets.

The company says it’s starting out with streaming to Oculus Go. Go is a three degrees of freedom (3DOF) headset with one controller, though, so don’t expect to jump up and start streaming Superhot to the $199 kit. The kit supports SteamVR and is focused on enterprise and location-based customers, thus TPCast says this service would be best for “real estate, home decoration/interior design, education, and other industry applications.”

However, the company’s press release also notes that support for Oculus Quest will be added in the future. Arriving later this year, Quest is another standalone but it has a full 6DOF range of movement thanks to inside-out tracking. Specifically, TPCast says this integration will allow users to freely walk and interact with each other. The company says it could be put to use in VR arcades.

We know that Quest won’t be able to plug into a PC to double as an Oculus Rift. Oculus did, however, debate offering a streaming solution similar to what TPCast is describing. According to Oculus’ John Carmack, it could turn into an official feature, but ‘no promises’ as of yet.

TPCast Air is on display on the CES show floor. We’ll look to get you some impressions later this week.